[jeremynevans]

A few comments here labelling this as impersonal, creepy or unethical. Full disclosure, I know the Numero team and we work with them, but I'd like to offer a different point of view.

It seems to me that the main point of this is to show off attention to detail, creativity and tongue-in-cheek messaging when applied to the hiring process, to attract candidates who'd do the same.

Given that the lists of 1,000 were combed through manually, with at least some receiving personalized messages, it seems at the very least a little more personal than your standard hiring process, and certainly no more creepy.

I can see why people might not like deepfakes being made light of, but that seems like a pretty nuanced issue and not something I'd immediately call 'unethical'. The main things for me are that (a) the people being deepfaked are involved in the process and (b) it's made extremely clear that the videos are faked.

Overall I'd say that the standard issues of fake-personalization or deepfakes revolve around something pretending to be more real or personalized than it actually is. Given that the entire goal of this is to show off how they stitched together tech to produce something the audience would find cool, it clearly isn't trying to fool anyone - in fact, surely doing so would defeat the whole point.

[version_five]

I didn't see an ethical problem with it. What prompted my comment below was that it was touted as a personalized service in the article when really it felt less personal than regular recruiting (and as you point out, there was a more thoughtful process of finding people in the first place, but then they got the fake videos + automated task to do).

It's equivalent in my mind to sending a form email that begins "Hello, $name". It's personalized in a technical sense but it's not personal. But not unethical either. On the ethics front I'd be more concerned about asking potential candidates to do some task - critique the website or whatever it was, without having any real skin in the game on the side of the hiring company. I don't agree with this kind of one-sided screening.